The mortgage-backed securities price drop reflects the natural tendancy of people to be sloppy with other people’s money. In this case, it was primarily the mortgage brokers shoveling out other people’s money to borrowers and hedge funds asking not quite enough questions about who is monitoring the borrowers before shoveling their investors money to purchase the loans. These capitalist swashbucklers should be lionized, not villified. If the US economy is not utilizing all of its productive capacity, we need to find some way to nudge it to work harder. If prime borrowers have borrowed all the money they want, then the extra money to get the economy moving has to be lent to subprime borrowers or monetary policy will be pushing on a string like in Japan where the nominal interest rate has been zero for a while and the real interest rate negative.

So expect the extra money to go into irrational stocks or to risky borrowers. If it doesn’t go to them and Congress isn’t swift enough to write everyone another $300 check, then we will just have idle capacity. Without a housing boom, instead of an overhang of houses that would be in danger of being foreclosed, we would have fewer houses, more unemployment, lower wages and lower GDP. We should continue to figure out ways to get money into the hands of people who will spend it even if they are speculators, sub prime borrowers, exuberant speculators and intrepid entrepreneurs.

Personally, I am in favor of subsidizing all consumer borrowing so that the benefits of rate cuts don’t accrue disproportionately to creditworthy borrowers. But whether it’s health care, green cleanup, space settlement or defense that you think needs more money spent on it, to just leave capacity idle is in my opinion even worse than spending it on my last choice.

It occurred to me as a programmed payments in one month in advance into Quicken software that the credit card issuers are fighting the last war. The reason I am programming my payments one month in advance is that I have about 15 minutes from the time I receive my bill to write a check, plop it in an express mail envelope, then race after the mail carrier to send it back the same day to avoid a late fee.

The late fees were rolling in bulking up bottom lines at Chase and others. The reason they implemented these fees was that interest rates were low so they jerked customers on late fees to raise revenues. The interest rate far exceeds the paycheck loan rates. $40 on a one-day late $400 payment is 128 quadrillion percent annual interest.

But now they are faced with an anxious set of commercial paper buyers and collateralized debt obligation buyers demanding to know the credit quality of the borrowers. Well, it sucks. Because it has become impossible to pay a credit card bill on time without a flow of quantum entangled photons becoming disentangled selectively at the instant you get your bill so you can pay it faster than the speed of light. Credit card issuers, do you feel that petard? It’s going to get hoisted a lot higher.

There are a lot of comments on Sam’s post earlier about China and India, but Gerald Hibbs has some cold water to splash on the Chinese’ problem, that I thought I’d move up to post level:

Right, every inch of China is covered with them growing something. Terraced hillsides are standard. As we whisk by on the train you can see them farming the way their grandparents did. Often you see the cliff dotted with caves. What are those? They live there. It is fascinating to watch and incredibly sad.

Meanwhile, government officials talk about how they are lifting a million people a year out of poverty. A million people a year! That is staggering. Even more so when you realize that they are over 1000 years away from lifting everyone in China out of poverty at that rate.

Kids on the farm on making their way to the city and finding it a hard row to hoe — especially since it is technically illegal to move like that without permission. We watched a documentary that followed one kid. Someone else in the village had gone to the city for a year and came home with enough money to get married and buy a house for his new wife. Off this young man — an only son — went where he worked illegally on a high rise construction project and slept in a worker’s dorm with no heat. He eventually went home because he couldn’t take the bitter winter cold.

We already hear of riots everywhere in China. Well, some details and statistics/conjecture leak out from foreign websites. Chinese government officals admitted to about 74,000 in 2004. Many rural people have television and they watch it filled with commercials for stuff they can’t afford (like pretty much everything as the average peasant makes about $150 a year) and modern TV soaps showing spoiled rich young people fighting over the prettiest girl. At the same time there is such a disparity between boy/girl births — especially in rural areas reaching sometimes 120 boys to 80 girls — that a poor (and heaven forbid stupid or ugly) village boy has little chance of marriage. It is made even worse by the fact that women are now getting into college and excelling. Why worse? Well, those boys are even more out in the cold then they were before. The women in China are going to experience a power shift in this generation like no other in history. I hope they live through it. I’ve seen any number of stories about girls kidnapped and sold as “wives.” My own wife was almost kidnapped off the street when she was younger.

How much longer can the condition continue? Especially when the people see the endless corruption. Guanxi, or relationships, are everything. I know one guy whose group paid a $10,000 bribe to be allowed to exploit an oil well his group owned. Someone else paid more, and had better relationship, and they were forced to sell for almost for pennies on the dollar. Now the people with more money and guanxi are running the oil well and getting richer. He lost much of his family’s life savings in that debacle.

I want to be optimistic but the situation is so inherently unstable. Imagine the gleaming cities of 20 years from now with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of peasants knowing they and their children are shut out. Or even worse know that they will know the shame of being a “branchless tree” (Chinese description of a man without a family.) Interesting times indeed. If anyone can give me a reasonable explanation of how this can end well short of a singularity — and molecular manufacturing to instantly provide economic parity — I’d love to hear it.

Fortunately, some kind of singularity-like event is likely to bail them (and the rest of us) out. Unfortunately, given the history of technological solutions, it will bring new problems of its own. The future is likely to be (in the words of the ancient Chinese curse) interesting times.

‘Industrial Revolution’ is a misnomer. Industry was just a thing to do after agriculture became easier. China and India are about half way through their ‘Agricultural Revolution’. According to the CIA World Factbook, a 45% of the 800 million labor force out of China’s 1.3 billion and 60% of India’s 500 million labor force out of 1.1 billion still work in agriculture. In the US, France and Poland the comparable numbers are 0.7%, 4.1%, and 16.1%. In the next couple of decades, we can expect Chinese and Indian algricultural sectors to achieve 100% labor efficiency improvements putting a total of 350 million people into manufacturing and services which will be a 50% rise. Over the next 100 years, we can expect them to catch up to France and put 96% of their labor forces away from agriculture. These are conservative predictions.

I talk a lot about marginal costs, because it’s an unappreciated factor in space access costs, but it’s also one in health care, given the lunatic way the current health insurance (including government health insurance) system is set up.

Arsonists certainly have strong motives for starting blazes. Rising incomes have fuelled a construction boom. Demand is high for land near the sea to build second homes. Although Greek law states that builders cannot put up homes on forest land, developers are practised at getting around the rules.

The cover story inThe Economist this week predicts that population will peak this century:

Last year the United Nations said it thought the world’s average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025. Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century.

This peak is only temporary. Fertility plotted vs. money income is U-shaped. Poor can’t afford family planning, but the rich want to have kids.

They further opine:

States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies.

Yes they should. A baby will become a taxpayer and a useful citizen. Zero population growth did far more to hold back development of China and India than Reagan’s (anti-) family planning policies.

We can grow food indoors, reuse our water and get the energy to do it from carbon free sources. The carrying capacity of the Earth is easily one trillion people. At the current rate of waste heat per person, we would be generating only 2% of what we get from the Sun. We could site 72 billion at the density of the Netherlands, 3.8 trillion at the density of Manhattan with the current land area.